Price Dispersion and the Costs of Inflation

Abstract

The new Keynesian literature typically makes the assumption that firms always have to satisfy demand. Because this assumption is at odds with profit-maximizing behavior under Calvo pricing when long-run inflation is positive, we present a new Keynesian model that relaxes this assumption. Our model predicts that inflation causes a substantially smaller loss in effective aggregate productivity compared to a benchmark model without the possibility of rationing. Moreover, under positive inflation, firms choose smaller markups over marginal costs in our model than in the benchmark model. As a result, our analysis suggests that the standard new Keynesian model may exaggerate the welfare costs of inflation. We also show that the effects are plausible to be quantitatively important.